GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

APPLES OR INDIANS • 153
ican peoples themselves, but instead depended entirely on the American
biota and environment.
WE HAVE NOW considered examples of three contrasting areas, in all of
which food production did arise indigenously. The Fertile Crescent lies at
one extreme; New Guinea and the eastern United States lie at the opposite
extreme. Peoples of the Fertile Crescent domesticated local plants much
earlier. They domesticated far more species, domesticated far more productive
or valuable species, domesticated a much wider range of types of
crops, developed intensified food production and dense human populations
more rapidly, and as a result entered the modern world with more
advanced technology, more complex political organization, and more epidemic
diseases with which to infect other peoples.
We found that these differences between the Fertile Crescent, New
Guinea, and the eastern United States followed straightforwardly from the
differing suites of wild plant and animal species available for domestication,
not from limitations of the peoples themselves. When more-productive
crops arrived from elsewhere (the sweet potato in New Guinea, the
Mexican trinity in the eastern United States), local peoples promptly took
advantage of them, intensified food production, and increased greatly in
population. By extension, I suggest that areas of the globe where food
production never developed indigenously at all—California, Australia, the
Argentine pampas, western Europe, and so on—may have offered even
less in the way of wild plants and animals suitable for domestication than
did New Guinea and the eastern United States, where at least a limited
food production did arise. Indeed, Mark Blumler's worldwide survey of
locally available large-seeded wild grasses mentioned in this chapter, and
the worldwide survey of locally available big mammals to be presented in
the next chapter, agree in showing that all those areas of nonexistent or
limited indigenous food production were deficient in wild ancestors of
domesticable livestock and cereals.
Recall that the rise of food production involved a competition between
food production and hunting-gathering. One might therefore wonder
whether all these cases of slow or nonexistent rise of food production
might instead have been due to an exceptional local richness of resources
to be hunted and gathered, rather than to an exceptional availability of